coinbase-craig

Hi, my name is Craig. I'm a real engineer. The reason I answer things this way is because I haven't actually been given explicit permission to respond to these kinds of things on behalf of the company, and I never want to open a can of worms by saying more than I should or than is necessary. So, you are wrong. This is definitely the real me here.

You are also wrong about the issue. What you are referencing is a specific time about a year ago. Note that all the posts you reference are exactly 343 days ago. Those issues have long been resolved on both individual and general scales. To bring them up now as if they are current issues is dishonest. We had one support person and a ticket queue of 8,000 items in the middle of a massive bubble and pop. That is why support "went dark". It took weeks to respond because it was not humanly possible to respond faster. We were working night and day. Now we have a team of 40 support with live chat, so it won't happen again.

The more common criticism we receive, and the one I was responding to, is the notion that we cancel orders due to "high risk" as an excuse when the price goes up (not down), because the coin is now more valuable and we'd profit by keeping it ourselves. That's just not how we work, and we have never done that. (It is never noted that we cancel as many transactions due to high risk when the price goes down, with the effect of actually saving false-positive users money they otherwise would have lost.) If you do not think this is our biggest criticism, or if you think the ones you referenced are still relevant, then you do not know enough about Coinbase to be making the claims that you are.

We've never canceled orders due to price changes.

Coinbase stores one private key that we can access, and one private key that is encrypted with the user's vault password on the front-end and sent to us encrypted for storage. The third key is the user's and we never see that.

We have no ability to access multisig vault funds without the user passphrase, which never touches our server.

Hi, Craig here from Coinbase. What changes would you like to see to the API?

Further, the security audit began this week before this issue. It was proactive, not responsive.

I guess I just disagree. To me, what you are "paid in" is the thing that changes ownership from your employer to you on pay day. It seems like you are simply insisting that "paid in" is synonymous with "priced in," in which case this debate is just a matter of semantics and not actually very interesting.

Also, to begin with, this conversation was about what I am paid in, not what my employer pays out. In your last sentence it sounds like you are confusing them, or using them interchangeably. I see no reason that they should be considered the same thing.

But dollars are not being delivered to me, that's the point. Bitcoin isn't acting as a middleman here-it's the end.

If I were your employer and decided to price your bi-weekly paycheck in terms of segways (each paycheck would be the dollar equivalent of one segway), does that mean you'd be "paid in segways"? No, you're paid in dollars.

You can't really claim someone is paid in dollars unless (1) they receive actual dollars, or (2) the thing they receive instead is guaranteed to be exchangeable for that dollar amount at any point into the future. Neither of these is true of a salary that is delivered in bitcoin, regardless of how it's priced.

At the end of the day I end up with bitcoin in my account, not dollars. So what you're saying does not seem correct to me. The conversion is just a way of determining how much bitcoin I should be paid.

Yep, basically. But what's your point? I don't want to do the extra work. I consider not having to a perk.

I get paid a USD equivalent. So if bitcoin went down next month, I'd just get a greater amount of bitcoin. I could change to being paid in USD instead, but I choose to be paid in bitcoin.

I get my salary paid in bitcoin and I think it's pretty awesome.

This is the speed of ACH bank transfers. There is nothing we can do it about it. It's part of the reason bitcoin is important.

On rare occasions we are not able to provide bitcoin at a locked-in price. When we can't, we offer the ability to place an order in USD for an amount of BTC equal to the exchange rate at the time that we receive your USD from the bank, 4 business days later. When this is offered as an option, we display a note on the buy page that says: "Note! We've exceeded our normal buy limits for today. If you would still like to purchase you will receive the market price of bitcoin on [some date] after your funds have arrived." You are also required to agree to a term like this before placing an order: "I acknowledge that the amount of BTC I receive will vary based on future exchange rates." Some users check the box without reading it; maybe this happened to you.

We're trying very hard to scale our support team. We've gone from 1 to 12 support in a matter of months, and we are hiring more support staff, and it is still difficult to keep up. We are responding, but it is almost impossible to grow fast enough. That said, 10 days sounds way too long. If you send your coinbase email address to me at craig(at)coinbase, I'll get your ticket prioritized.